Accelerating Microsoft Dynamics Deployments on Microsoft Azure

In my conversations with customers, one of the key things I hear is how they are looking for technology that can keep pace with their business. They want solutions that give them the agility to change with their customer’s and market needs. For example, retailer Pet Supplies Plus is gaining both more flexibility while lowering costs by putting their business infrastructure in the Microsoft cloud.

Cloud has played a significant role in helping our customers keep up with this pace of change. With the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 in 2014 and Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle services (LCS) in 2013, we are enabling our customers to use the power of the cloud to develop and test their business critical ERP solutions, helping them enter a new era of business applications in the cloud. Earlier this year, with the availability of Microsoft Azure D-Series Virtual Machines, we took the step of giving our customers the choice to directly deploy production instances for Dynamics AX on Azure utilizing LCS and giving them clear, predictable, repeatable implementation capabilities as well as significantly reducing their deployment times. As a result, to date, we have seen more than 15,000 Dynamics AXcloud VMdeployments in Azure, a number that continues to grow daily.

To help our large enterprise customers and further accelerate Dynamics AX deployments and give even more deployment choice for Dynamics CRM on Azure, we are excited about the announcement of the global availability and introduction of a new variant of the powerful G-series class of servers called the GS-series that combine the compute power of G-series with the performance of Premium Storage to create incredibly powerful VMs for storage and compute intensive applications. The capabilities offered by the new GS-series give even more choice to our customers to deploy Dynamics AX on Microsoft Azure – capabilities such as supporting high volume transaction volumes to enable real-time inventory and BI capabilities that any global, world class enterprise requires to run their business critical applications.

In addition, we are also enabling new ways for our customers to achieve incredible business agility by giving them the ability to leverage the elasticity of Azure. Specifically providing customers and partners tools and services to manage their environments efficiently in Azure through simple capabilities in LCS. We are doing this by providing a set of PowerShell scripts that leverage Azure Automation through Runbooks capabilities as the first step in this journey. We expect this elasticity will help our customers and partners that are doing dev/test on Azure to reduce their monthly costs by up to 69% or more and have environments ready for their developers or users when they need them instead of making them wait to spin them up.

We continue to help simplify our customers utilizing these new updates and advancements through LCS by planning to provide support for the deployment of the GS-series VMs by the end of September and the integration of the Runbooks capability into LCS by the end of November. And finally, to deliver the most value to our customers for their technology investments, starting October 1 2015, we are pleased to announce a reduction in the prices on D-series VMs by up to 27%.

All of today’s announcements demonstrate that we are taking the next major step in our journey to reinvent productivity and business processes for our customer and taking Dynamics on Azure to the next level.

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